If you’re an employer, you may try to monitor employee substance abuse through drug testing, but you know that’s not a perfect system. Addicts can come up with the most creative ways to get around a test. Plus, no test can tell you whether alcohol or drugs are being used or distributed during work. Short of putting cameras in the bathrooms, what else can you do? How do you know if employees are dealing to their coworkers, and how do you prevent it from happening?
Signs a Drug Trade Could Be Happening in Your Workplace
Opioids and other drugs could be getting passed around by your employees, causing absenteeism, injury risks, and even potential deaths in your workplace. In a study done by the NSC (National Safety Council), more than 75% of employers have been affected in some way by employee opioid abuse, and 38% experienced employee absenteeism and impaired work performance. If drug trade is happening in your workplace, your business could turn into a breeding ground for addicted workers. Here are some signs to look out for:
Do a group of your workers meet in the parking lot, or in a car often?
This could be a sign that one of your employees is dealing drugs to their coworkers out of their car.
Are your employees hanging out in the bathroom together?
Frequent or long bathroom breaks for multiple employees could also point to a meeting space where a drug trade is taking place.
Are your employees making more mistakes than usual or are more work injuries happening?
This is a dangerous sign that your employees could be struggling with addiction, and could even be using on the job.
Do your employees call in sick a lot?
Having multiple employees skip out on work can cripple your company’s productivity and is a tell-tale sign of substance abuse in your work force.
Do your employees seem to be buying a lot of expensive swag when you know they can’t afford it on the salary you pay them?
This could also be a sign that one of your workers is dealing in the workplace as a side hustle.
Signs of an Addicted Worker
Has one of your employees recently been on workers comp after an injury? Have they come back to work acting off? Maybe a few of your employees seem to be lagging behind with their work. This could be a sign that prescription medications or pain pills are being abused and traded around the workplace. Even if an employee does have a valid prescription for their medication, they could still be misusing it, or trading it to coworkers. How do you tell which of your employees are struggling with substance abuse? Some of the signs to look out for in your workers are:
- Falling asleep or nodding off at work
- Low morale
- Weight loss
- Poor hygiene
- Calling in sick a lot
- Trouble focusing
- Missing deadlines
- Making mistakes
- Withdrawals
How to Help Employees Struggling With Addiction
By bringing awareness to substance abuse and offering addiction treatment resources to your workers, you can change your workplace culture and put an end to substance abuse at your company. Make your employees feel comfortable coming to you, HR, or an EAP about their substance abuse and mental health issues. De-stigmatizing addiction treatment can encourage your employees to get the help they need, allowing them to return to their job as a more productive worker.
Give your workers struggling with addiction a solution: residential addiction treatment. At Transformations Care, we have a no-BS program that gets to the underlying issues contributing to addiction. Our program focuses on teaching relapse prevention and finding healthy coping mechanisms, such as music or art as an alternative to drugs and alcohol. After residential addiction treatment, your workers will be back in action in no time. Give us a call today at 424.339.0965, and help fight the drug trade in your workplace.
GUIDE
Getting Clean & Sober at Home
Today, more than 75% of hospitals and healthcare providers offer access to telehealth treatment, with 29 states having gone so far as to enact telehealth parity laws, which force insurance companies to reimburse patients for telehealth at the same rates as they would for in-person treatment.
If you’ve been thinking about getting clean and sober, or if you’ve been wanting to work on and strengthen the recovery you already have, it’s never been easier to do it through telehealth.
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